ssm@cmu-ri-leg.ARPA (Sesh Murthy) (03/28/85)
NEW DELHI, India - The Indian government expressed ''serious
concern'' on Monday over the defection to the United States of a
Soviet diplomat based here and urged Washington to give full details
of the case.
Some members of Parliament said they suspected that the Central
Intelligence Agency had played a role in the incident.
Khursheed Alam Khan, the minister of state for external affairs,
told Parliament that investigations were continuing into ''how an
official of the Soviet Embassy left India clandestinely.'' Khan said
the American Embassy here confirmed on Sunday that the diplomat, Igor
Gezha, ''had sought and been granted political asylum by the U.S.
government at a point outside India.''
The defection, along with the assassination by an unknown gunman of
another Soviet Embassy official last Thursday, has caused
considerable embarrassment to the Indian government. One reason cited
is that extensive police searches and investigations turned up
nothing in either case, reflecting what members of Parliament
described on Monday as a failure of intelligence agencies.
Second, the government was tipped off by the Soviet ambassador, who
complained that Gezha was possibly at the U.S. Embassy here. The
defection was then confirmed by Gordon L. Streeb, the senior American
diplomat here, who was summoned to the Indian Foreign Office to
explain the incident.
The American Embassy said in a statement on Monday that the defector
was ''safe and well in the United States.'' But U.S. officials would
not say how he had left New Delhi or whether American officials here
had assisted him, except that he had not visited the embassy.
Gezha, who is 37 years old and was a member of the Soviet
Information Center here, was reported missing after he failed to
return from a morning walk on March 17.
How he got out of the country is still unknown, as is much else
about the case.
The American statement said there was no connection between the
defection and the slaying of Valentin Khitrichenko, a member of the
Soviet Embassy's economic section, last Thursday. The United States
''has no information concerning the perpetrators of the attack,'' the
statement said.
However, Khan, the minister of state, refused to rule out a
connection between the two incidents. Responding to allegations that
the CIA might have been involved, Khan told members of the upper
house of Parliament: ''You know the role of the CIA and what they
do.'' He did not elaborate.
A top police official said investigators were no longer connecting
the defection and the slaying. ''The defection is now a closed
chapter,'' said Suryakant Jog, the New Delhi police commissioner. He
said that investigations into the shooting of Khitrichenko were
continuing and that Afghan exile groups were being questioned. ''No
one has yet been detained,'' Jog said.
The commissioner had speculated earlier that Gezha might have taken
an airline flight from an Indian city to Katmandu in Nepal and then
flown to the United States. But he said that checks of international
airports in the country had not turned up his name. This has fueled
suspicion that Gezha traveled out of India on a false passport.
A Soviet spokesman said that Gezha's passport and identity card were
with the embassy here. ''So wherever he has gone, he must have gone
in clear contravention of rules,'' the official, Vladimir Tsatsyn,
said. The use of false identification papers is a criminal offense in
India, punishable with a prison sentence.
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